Monthly Archive for May, 2010

On your deathbed, would you wish you worked more or less?

You may be disappointed to know that given a long enough timeline, despite the enormous efforts of doctors, rescue workers and other medical professionals worldwide, the global death rate remains constant at 100 percent.

If you knew your time would be up in a year, I bet you would work much less if at all, but statistically speaking, we will not die next year. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the average life expectancy of a new-born in the late 1990’s is 77 years for a male and 82 years for a female so working and building our asset base is part of our long term strategy.

So assuming we are the 80% of people who live to the new retirement age of 67 (Which may just change again before we reach 67) then the questions we must ask ourselves is how do we get the most out of our lives and what is our optimal work life balance?

There is no doubt that life in general is busier than in prior generations, my dad likes to remind me of that every time we speak. There are more “things” to buy, more mod-cons to assist us to be time efficient, although I am not convinced of that as an outcome and yet as a society we are claiming to be time poor.

We work more total hours, spread out over more days, and for many every day of the week is a working day. And yet the suicide rate is climbing steadily, again according to the ABS. Does this suggest that we work more and are less satisfied? Are the two linked?

Maybe the answer is individual.

Whatever your answer is, you may need to alter the amount of time you dedicate to the following areas of your life, to truly achieve your work/life balance.

Work/life Balance Wheel

Work/life Balance Wheel

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Is your product the problem?

The majority of my time is spent educating and training staff on the value of customer service, store presentation, marketing, customer profiling and ensuring they can keep their food and labour to budget which are all important issues should a store wish to grow sales and/or customer counts on a local level.

Today’s post was found by Andrew Powell of Montreal Canada, sent to Dr Marc Dussault who then forwarded it on to me. It’s a great example of a promotional video for a Quick Service Retail operation.

Many of the business owners I meet and work with are frustrated with their sales and customer counts because they feel that they are doing everything they possibly can to ensure ‘EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE’ not realizing that the product itself acts as a barrier to sales growth.

What does your business do to measure customer satisfaction of your product and does your business act on this feedback whether positive or negative?

One business has taken the measurement and action to a whole new level not shying away from the negative feedback, they have embraced the feedback and as an entire corporation of 9,000+ stores made the changes that their customers have demanded of them.

Any Fast Food Franchise or independent operator would be well served to create a video that tells ‘their story’ like this. Please enjoy!

Further information on this story can be found at pizzaturnaround.com

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